This may be somewhat old news, but I thought it’s still a worthy mention in Quartzimodo’s Time Journal. 🙂

If you haven’t already read the superb interview at the GMT+9 blog, here’s the inside scoop on the man who has been highly instrumental in giving watch enthusiasts around the globe access to Japanese market Seikos that are normally not sold outside of Japan.

While there are several online watch vendors in Japan, unfortunately many do not sell to overseas customers, including yours truly. It’s most probably due to the English language barrier itself or a lack of interest in opening their online business to the outside world.

Above: Higuchi’s brick-and-mortar store in the city of Chuomachi, Oita Prefecture in Japan.

Thanks to sellers such as Katsuhisa Higuchi, who runs Higuchi Inc, Seiko watch lovers all over the world have been enjoying the privilege of buying Seiko models that are not generally available elsewhere but Japan. Without the likes of Katsu-san, I wouldn’t have been able to acquire my Ti Samurais, SBBN007 Tuna Can and SBDC001 Sumo divers at reasonable prices. 🙂

It sure beats having to fork out money for an expensive return flight ticket to Japan, not to mention the accommodation, traveling and food expenses just to get that Grand Seiko or Prospex diver that you’ve been wanting! Of course, if you happen to be traveling to Japan that’s a different story altogether! 😉

Hi Quartzimodo: I know this is an old article from 2008. Today, it is October 18, 2012. But do you know what happened to GMT+9? There is a note now at the site that just says they are having some kind of technical problems and they are busily fixing things up, but they should be back soon. This site used to be one of my favorite sites, and it was a real pleasure reading many of their articles. Who are these destructive creeps who have damaged this site? Yours, Paul

The GMT+9 site has been down for a number of years and it’s a pity that the site owners are still unable to revive it. Currently the landing page is hosted by a server located in Germany (Powerserver.org) and the domain name is registered to Larry Biggs, a well known and respected member of the old Seiko & Citizen Watch Forum. I’m not sure who really owns and administers the GMT+9 site; whether it was one person or collectively by several members of SCWF. Details of what really happened to the site is unknown to me as I’ve been out of touch with the folks who contributed to GMT+9’s articles.

Someone did mention about GMT+9 being attacked through a simple link from a privately owned watch blog (whose former blog address is also linked to mine), but I fail to understand how a site being linked to another site could be attacked, unless the security measures where GMT+9 was originally hosted with were strong. I have no who the original hosting provider was; whether it’s the same one today or a different hosting company (or privately hosted). The level of detail and content on GMT+9 is very admirable, which reflects the passion of the contributing writers in that blog.

I hope that GMT+9’s admins are able to recover every single article that was published and get the site up and running soon. 🙂

It’s indeed a big pity GMT+9 is down. I had contacted Petew after it was down. He told me they were trying to revive the website, but unfortunately, with no result. GMT+9 had been an example of how an interesting wristwatch weblog should look at and has for me been an initiation to start 50 Gs. I sincerely hope something like this would not happen to my weblog (over 300 articles at the moment).

As I have frequent contact with both Katsu-san as Seiya-san, I was playing with the thought to do an interview with both again for 50 Gs. I really miss these interviews and some good articles that were on GMT+9.